Photoblog

I am writing this review having in mind that Topaz is offering a half price discount for one of their best products: Topaz Denoise. You can downloaded as a free trial for 30 days from Topaz Labs page:  Topaz Denoise . The product is now 39.99$ instead of 79.99$ with the coupon code “mardenoise” (type it without quotes), until the end of March. I would mention that I really appreciate that Topaz guys do not have differentiated prices for European and US customers like other vendors (making European customers paying about 40% more for the same stuff). So, what is Topaz Denoise? It is a plugin for Photoshop CS, Elements, Lightroom, Aperture, IrfanView (and I even managed to use it within Gimp with some emulator couple of years ago before entering into Photoshop world). It is the first noise removal plugin that I use and the only one that is part of my workflow at the moment and that has been constantly part of it in the last 2 years). Despite some attempts to try other si...

Recently I heard about a new tool for Black and White conversion called Tonality Pro. It is on of the interesting product produced by the guys from MacPhun and it addresses only to Mac users. Tonality Pro can be downloaded and tried for free for 15 days. I will write this informal review having as a reference Nik Silver Efex Pro which is what I currently use for my black and white work all time. As Nik Silver Efex is generally recognised as a market standard and a product of high quality and maturity in the world of photography plugins, I must admit that the bar is very high for any competitor. Tonality Pro comes as standalone application or as plugin for Photoshop CC/Lightroom/Elements/Aperture. I am going to test it only as plugin for Photoshop as my workflow is entirely in CC, so going out in an external application and importing image back to CC does not really make sense for me.The first think I must say is that it is a bit slow. Both lunching it and applying some p...

Couple of days ago I have received a newsletter from the friends from Topaz Labs , featuring an offer for ViewPoint 2, software made by their partners DXO. I knew about DXO before from their well known DXOMarks, cameras and lenses reviews, benchmarking’s and ratings, but I was not aware that they are also producing photographic software’s. The geek in me was really curious and decided to give ViewPoint 2 a try. View Point comes as both Photoshop plugin and standalone application and according to their website: “The indispensable companion to your wide-angle lens, DxO ViewPoint fixes perspectives and easily restores the natural shapes of the subjects located along image edges.” As an architecture photographer I was getting interested to learn more about this, so I installed the trial version and watched a quick tutorial movie. Since I am a Photoshop user, I am much more interested in the plugin version, as it integrates much easily in my workflow, so this is what I have used for t...